


Honesty Hour

by voxmyriad



Category: Team Fortress 2
Genre: Gen, He's a good kid, Scout's a horrible child, Spy will never tell him, Unhappy Returns, not really - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-01-01
Updated: 2015-01-01
Packaged: 2018-03-04 15:43:34
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,388
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3073352
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/voxmyriad/pseuds/voxmyriad
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Between being starved out of the bank and being tried/hanged for their crimes, Spy and Scout have a heart-to-heart about fathers, children, and keeping some things for yourself.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Honesty Hour

**Author's Note:**

> So first let me just say that I also endorse the theory that Spy IS Scout's dad. I like both theories. Then I reread Unhappy Returns and wondered what Spy and Scout found to talk about when they were locked up together, and I've been writing sad emotional things lately, so this happened.

"It just kinda burns me, y'know?"

Spy removed the cigarette from his mouth and blew a thin stream of smoke toward the upper bunk. "Will I regret it if I ask what you are talking about?"

"You got anything else to do right now?"

"I already regret that I must say no." He inhaled again and blew a wobbly smoke ring. "What are you talking about?"

Scout's face appeared over the side of the upper bunk, folded on his arms. The boy looked oddly pensive, and he would not look directly at Spy, but at least he had stopped throwing a baseball against the cinder block walls of this annoyingly secure podunk prison. "The guys. Raggin' on me for having you for a dad."

Spy took another drag and held the cigarette out with an inquisitive brow-raise. Scout shook his head and Spy shrugged and took it back.

"Why does it 'burn' you, as you say?"

"'Cause it ain't true! An' I said it ain't true, I said it dozens a' times, but you'd think I'm just talkin' to the freakin' wall for all the good it does." Scout disappeared. The springs on the bunk creaked alarmingly as he flung himself down, probably facing the wall from the position Spy could see. "It ain't true, an' it makes my real dad disappear, and I hate it."

The springs creaked again as Scout's eye reappeared. "You know it ain't true, right?" he said challengingly.

"Of course I know."

"Like, they ain't got you convinced you—"

"Scout, I was not on the same continent as your mother when you were conceived. I know."

"So why don't you say anything ever?"

"What would you have me do, Scout? Deny it? Give them that fuel for the fire of their speculations?" Spy shook his head. "They will believe what they believe. It does not matter what we say. We look enough alike, so they say."

"Do we?"

" _Pardon_?"

" _Do_ we look alike? I ain't never seen your face." Now Scout was looking at him, studying him, perhaps trying to see himself in the limited view the balaclava allowed him.

Spy shrugged, one-shouldered, and held out the cigarette again. This time, Scout took it, took a drag—expertly enough that he had clearly done so before, though Spy had never seen him smoking—and handed it back. "Alike enough, perhaps. We share some common characteristics. But your hair is lighter."

"Yeah?"

"Mm." Spy stretched his legs out, crossed them at the ankles. "You would never have such light hair if your _maman_ and I had had you. It would have been a miracle of genetics." His hair, where it wasn't touched with gray, was the same dark as Scout's mother's.

"I mean, I know you ain't my dad, for certain. I remember my dad."

That was a surprise. Spy glanced up at him, silently inquiring.

Scout flumped back again, starfished across the too-narrow bunk. "Not a lot. But I remember sitting on the floor and watching two pairs 'a legs walkin' around the kitchen. Big shoes, guys' shoes. I think he loved her. I mean, what do I know, I was three when he died."

He went quiet, and Spy did not disturb the silence, only filled it with a few more smoke rings.

"Someone sent lilies. I know everyone sends lilies to a funeral, I know that now, but back then I just thought...I'd never seen 'em before. I wanted to keep one to play with. Ripped it up on accident. Ma hadda explain about flowers dying."

A fist came down on the mattress. "You ain't gonna say anything about this."

"Even if we were not going to be hanged, I would not," Spy said. "It is not mine to say."

"Damn right."

Spy took a last drag and put the cigarette out in an empty coffee can. The distant sounds of the rest of the prison filtered through the silence. "You really think they're gonna do it?" Scout asked, subdued now. "They're gonna hang us?"

"I know they think they are going to," Spy said. "I do not think they will succeed. For now, we have little to do but wait." He had several contingency plans before he would reach _give up and be hanged_ in his list of things to do.

"But why do you not tell them any of this, when they tease?" he asked, changing the subject back to something apparently less distressing to the boy than their theoretical impending demise. "The shoes, the lily. You remember him clearly, if only briefly."

The springs bent and released as Scout jumped down, too wound up to lie still for long. He paced, and Spy regretted that in the orange jumpsuit, the comparison to a caged tiger was inevitable. He did not voice it; it was too clichéd. "'Cause. You wouldn't get it."

"Try me, _lapin_."

Scout darted a hunted stare at him before tossing his baseball, sending it thunking off the plexiglas, the cinder blocks, back to his hand. A second time. He was instinctively brilliant with trajectory, Spy had discovered. "I ain't gotta share him with anybody if I don't wanna."

Spy sat up, bracing his back against the wall. The chill seeped through the jumpsuit. He ignored it in favor of not craning his neck to watch Scout tossing the ball in increasingly complicated patterns off the walls, floor, ceiling, even the corners of the bed.

"Why don't it bother you?"

"Should it?" Spy lit another cigarette. "You are a horrible child, to be sure, but there are worse things to be accused of than being a father."

Scout caught the ball behind his back and leaned against the opposite wall. " _Do_ you got any kids?"

"What is this, honesty hour?" Spy asked, nettled. "Just because we are trapped in the same ten-by-ten cell does not mean—"

"Spy, it's like the simplest question there is, either you got kids or you don't. So, which is it?"

"I decline." Spy lay back down.

"Aw, c'mon, you can't—"

"Sleeping now." He closed his eyes.

"It's two in the afternoon!"

"Shhhh."

Scout scoffed and started bouncing the ball off the wall just above Spy's head. Spy opened his eyes again. "Don't think I cannot kill you just because we are in here. Or that I will not."

"At least a fight would be somethin' to do. You ever been in a street fight? A real one, not just sneaking around corners and runnin' off."

"Of course I have."

"Yeah? You might hafta prove that." Scout tossed his ball neatly onto his bunk and squared up. "C'mon, you an' me."

"Oh, please. You cannot be serious. You have been addled. I would say the hot sun had gotten to you, but, well." Scout didn't move. "I cannot believe they think you are my son. I'm not going to fight you just to pass the time, you horrible child."

"Why won't you tell me if you got kids or not?"

"Because I do not need to share with anyone if I do not wish to, Scout!"

Scout opened his mouth to say something more, then shut it so fast his teeth clicked. To Spy's mild surprise, he took a running leap easily into the upper bunk and flopped onto his back. "Yeah, okay. That's cool."

"...it is."

"Yeah."

"You're giving up?"

"Yeah."

Spy leaned out from his bunk to look up. Scout was tossing the ball at the ceiling, only millimeters from touching it, and catching it in the other hand. "I will kick myself later for not accepting this and moving on, but why are you not being your usual aggressively idiotic stubborn self?"

"'Cause. Maybe you don't know me as good as you think."

"I seriously doubt that."

"You di'nt know I knew my dad before today."

"...you have a point. Amazingly."

"I am pretty freakin' amazing, yeah."

"Yes. Of course. That is certainly what I meant." Spy lay back again. He blew a smoke ring at the bottom bunk.

"You care about Ma, right?"

" _Oui_ , I care for her very much."

"'Cause she ain't had anybody around in a long time."

"I know."

"An' I'll kill you if you hurt her. Really kill, like, you'll be dead. No gettin' back up from it."

"I would expect nothing less."


End file.
